Fantasy racism is, simply put, “discrimination and/or prejudice involving fictional races or non-human species.” (According to TVTropes, at least.) Specifically, we’ll be talking about that second part – non-human species – because it’s what’s most immediately relevant to the world I’m building.
This is a trope that’s hard to do right. There are countless online articles, video essays, etc. that have broken down how fantastic racism in various media ends up with unintended and unfortunate implications about race – or worse, entirely intentional and unfortunate implications.* Even when fantasy racism is done well, there are some issues with the concept as a whole (that I may end up addressing in another blog post down the line).
* I’ve seen all kinds of things get critiqued, but by far the most common is the urban fantasy film “Bright,” which (although I’ve never watched it) seems to be a paragon of how not to do fantasy racial allegories.
It’s also just not a trope I’m particularly interested in developing. Fantastical allegories for racism are ubiquitous. It’s so common a trope in works with multiple species (or types of magic user, or whatever) that not including it is, I think, more unexpected and interesting than having it present. I’m sure there are still versions of this trope yet to be created that are still interesting, fresh, able to invigorate this trope with new life. But boring, repetitive versions have been done so often that the trope itself often leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I also simply don’t want to devote the time to trying to think of a new version of this trope that breathes new life into it. (Why do that when you could spend months mapping your world according to the Koppen Climate Classification?)
Of course, that’s not to say that there won’t be discrimination in this world. It’s just not going to fall along species lines, and it’s not generally going to be a direct parallel for modern Western visions of race.
Unfortunately, speciesism is hard to get rid of for reasons other than habit. The big problem is how seemingly inevitable it is. When two groups come into conflict with each other, more often than not they’ll try to find some fundamental distinction between them. This can be race, it can be language, it can be religion – really, anything works. And when you have two groups who are of different species coming into conflict, species is probably going to be fairly obvious as a “fundamental difference”.
The first way I tried to get around this issue is by making it so that there are never single-species societies. If, from the onset of sapience, the two species have worked together and formed societies together, it might never occur to them to draw distinctions along species lines. Instead, self- and other-hood could be understood based along cultural differences, rather than appearance differences – language, religion, etc. Unfortunately, it’s not particularly plausible that these societies would be the first to occur – or, if they were, they wouldn’t last very long in comparison to single-species groups. In hunter-gatherer societies, which are generally fairly small, inbreeding can become a problem. Because of this, hunter-gatherers often practice exogamy with neighbouring tribes. But if each society is made up of two species, the available gene pool is cut in half. Each tribe would need to be able to coordinate meeting with twice as many tribes to have the same level of genetic diversity. Societies made up of two species would be at a considerable disadvantage to societies made up only of one.
But there’s another method for getting around species-based prejudice. Instead of worrying about the groups in conflict, you worry about the conflict itself. What if the two species simply never clash? This seems hard to achieve. One option is for the two species to not be in competition for the same resources. There’s no reason for them to fight if there’s nothing for them to fight over.
This is the case for the humans and the golkh. Golkh can get enough nutrition from small sources of meat – rodents, birds, insects. They also are more disease-resistant than humans, meaning they can more reliably scavenge meat and eat windfall, and more toxin-resistant. But they’re worse at hunting than humans, meaning they don’t try and take down large game. As such, Golkh and humans won’t be in competition for food. Humans eat primarily large game which Golkh can’t hunt, as well as some plants (like roots, tubers and fruit). Golkh eat small game which is inefficient for humans to hunt, as well as scavenged meat, windfall, fungi, and some other flora. This neutralizes other potential resources which can be sources of conflict. As they don’t share a food source, territory won’t be as much of a concern – the two species can extract different resources from the same patch of land.
In some of these cultures, this cohabitation may evolve into a kind of mutualism. Humans may rely on Golkh to dispose of rotting meat, or to clear out pests, with the golkh getting a meal out of the exchange. Or perhaps a society of agrarian golkh relies on human hunter-gatherers, who trade the golkh meat that they wouldn’t be able to hunt for technology that the humans didn’t have access to. Eventually, these societies may become reliant on each other, shaping their lifestyles around this constant exchange.